Tell Health and Human Services Secretary to Apologize for Unethical Experiment that Exposed Premature Infants to Risk of Death and Blindness and Prevent Similar Failures in the Future

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius should personally apologize to the parents of 1,316 premature infants who were exposed to increased risk of blindness and death as part of a clinical trial funded by the National Institutes of Health and held throughout the U.S. several years ago because they were not informed of the risks to their babies or the true nature and purpose of the research.

Add Your Name to the Petition to Secretary Sebelius

We, the undersigned, call on you to apologize to each of the parents of the premature infants enrolled in the unethical trial at 23 U.S. medical centers. This apology should be accompanied by a complete divulgence of the previously undisclosed information regarding the nature, purpose, and risks of the research.

We also urge you to take the following actions:

Direct the Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) to require each participating institution to submit corrective action for avoiding such serious deficiencies in the consent process for future research.

Launch an independent investigation into how the HHS system for review and oversight of clinical trials failed so miserably. This should include an assessment of all entities within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) or other HHS agencies that played a role in the review, approval and funding of the study.

Determine what system-wide actions are necessary to prevent similar future failures.

Identify and suspend any similarly unethical ongoing research involving premature infants that is funded by NIH or any other HHS agency.

Spread the Word

Background

The trial, known as the SUPPORT study, was conducted between 2005 and 2009 at 23 prominent research facilities throughout the country, including the Stanford University School of Medicine, Yale University School of Medicine, Brown University, Duke University and University of Alabama at Birmingham.

This violates the right to informed consent, and puts the most vulnerable in a dangerous place.

16915

Wed Oct 12 04:49:17 EDT 2016

Jade Chen

Being born very premature myself (and 30 years later, I was almost destroyed by powerful and dangerous psychotropic drugs by an unethical, lawbreaker psychiatrist in an East Asian Province), I More....am APPALLED to learn about this EXTREME TORTURE conducted on premature babies WITHOUT their parent's consent (AS IF premature babies are NOTHING but DISPOSABLE DIAPERS)!

Medical doctors would NEVER do this to a full term or postmature (born too late) newborn, then WHY, WHY, WHY DOES IT HAPPEN TO PREMATURE BABIES!?

...

Premature babies ARE HUMAN BEINGS, just like any other baby born in the hospital!

WE (premature babies) ARE NOT MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS (then "tossed away" like trash), PERIOD!

16914

Sat Oct 10 22:46:44 EDT 2015

Jo Ellen Bate

16913

Fri Sep 04 15:02:54 EDT 2015

Leslie Hatcher

This violates right to informed consent, and so many other ethical standards set by federal regulation to ensure ethics in research. How is this happening? Why is the NIH funding medical abuse of vulnerable More....populations in the name of "research"? The parents of these infants, and the nurses who cared for them under false pretenses deserve more than an apology.

16912

Wed Apr 29 20:48:10 EDT 2015

Anonymous

Do not use forced medicalization on any body.

16911

Sun Apr 12 12:25:39 EDT 2015

Anonymous

16910

Tue Apr 07 20:56:15 EDT 2015

Anonymous

16909

Wed Apr 01 16:04:03 EDT 2015

myron gross

16908

Sat Jan 31 07:09:20 EST 2015

Gary Anderson

experiment on Kathy!

16907

Thu Jan 29 19:32:20 EST 2015

Rachel cornish

I cannot believe this was allowed to happen!! Never heard about this in the news! Was it covered up? Shame on you

16906

Thu Jan 29 19:31:52 EST 2015

Rachel cornish

I cannot believe this was allowed to happen!! Never heard about this in the news! Was it covered up? Shame on you

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